You are a saint and a scholar for making the most important mod ever made in modding history. There's a special seat at the The Christ's table reserved just for you, good sir.

It's not compatible with "reformed reformation" mod. Sad!

REEEEEEEEEEE

Thanks. I got the option to duel a pregnant, 16 year old girl in the middle of a battle and had enough.

oh dear you!

thx 4 the mod! When 2 of my heirs wives got killed in duels consecutively in the span of 18 months, I decided that it was enough!

I leave this comment section for a while, and as expected, it blew up in a sea of rage.
-Find one female warrior grave
-"Of course that means half the warriors in any given Nordic Kingdom was a female."

I don't think the author or anyone else was saying that female warriors never existed, because they clearly did, but that there was no female warrior CLASSES dedicated solely to female warriors in Nordic society, not one lick of evidence besides hearsay.

You may call female warriors individually "Shieldmaidens" if you like, but to say that they represented a class at all acknowledged by the Norse of the time is not in the least bit valid, let alone sensible. These myths(What they are until proven otherwise) often come coupled with the idea that Vikings were an entire culture based in Scandinavia, and all Scandinavians survived off of Viking raids, when the actual majority of Scandinavians were simply farmers.

@ROCK almost 8k hours, never seen a horse take over the world mate, but nice false equivalency. Women leading troops to the extent that it's shown in CK2 right now is ahistorical and silly, and I generally turn off all the ahistorical events and secret cults anyways. Other demonic stuff could be chalked up to mediæval perceptions of mental illness so it's still historical to some extent. Nice thing bout all of this is that it's optional, but currently Paradox sees no problem not adding an option for this ingame to be set to "historical" i.e 99% of the case no noble women would lead in wars, like with gender equality in regards to laws that can also be set to historical. My question is, why isn't there an official option to set this to historical too?

Thank the gods for this mod to remove that silliness

This does exactly what it says and doesn't screw anything up, but I have to admit that I clicked it just to see the inevitable shitstorm in the comments.

So long as it's a male horse overlord then it's 100% accurate.

I cannot STAND it when my "Norse horse takes over the world" game is ahistorical, thanks guys

@NihilVerum I saw a lot of women for the Tengri warrior lodge(I forget what they are called)

I assume this is not compatible with Ironman?
The number of female warriors is getting out of hand after Holy Fury, not just for pagans.

@ Morphine Cheese Addiction - ''makes norse women by default able to lead troops. Seems historically accurate to me.''

That's not historically accurate at all.

http://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/society/text/women.htm

@ Morphine Cheese Addiction - ''So the commander/shieldmaiden thing is referred to when seeing if someone can -lead armies-. You specifically say that several women -lead armies-. You are defeating your own argument.''

Leading an army doesn't make you a warrior, which women have never really been. Also almost every example of women leading armies was because they were widows and therefore they acted in their husbands stead. That is nothing at all like what the revionists are saying.

@Landstrider HIP adds trait requirements for martial women in applicable cultures, makes sure women who can't be commanders can't have martial education, and makes norse women by default able to lead troops. Seems historically accurate to me.

@Morphine Cheese Addiction - Save it smartass, there is no evidence for female warriors being anything of note or having influence like they are currently being despicted in the vanilla game, you actually have to be delusional to believe this shit.
The fact that you and a load of other triggered idiots are moaning about a mod that lets you OPTIONALLY get to play a more historical version of the game is pretty sad. HIP does this aswell, why aren't you massive twats complaining about your amazon fantasies over there?

@Dodge genocide tank - Said it before but I don't care if it's an optional feature just not when I have historical accuracy on. You don't see me moaning about Aztec Invasion or Supernatural Events because you can turn those off or on as you please.

Wait, Holy Fury makes women warriors, in the lodge, on the battlefied, really? The only historical purpose of the Shield Maiden was to make the army LOOK bigger than it actually was. They carried a shield for a reason. That way the enemy commander (hopefully) couldn't tell the diffence at distance.

@Landstrider As opposed to the guy referencing a freelance writer as his expert opinion?

Lol'ed at all the triggered idiots who get their history from the Vikings show and use Internet Top Ten lists as sources to justify believing in delusional amazonian fantasies.

wow you guys sure are mad that women can do things even in a video game

So the commander/shieldmaiden thing is referred to when seeing if someone can -lead armies-. You specifically say that several women -lead armies-. You are defeating your own argument.

Also read this Cassius https://www.quora.com/Did-female-warriors-like-those-often-depicted-in-modern-medieval-fantasy-actually-exist

This guy pretty much sums up my own views on warrior women in a more historically in depth way than I can manage on a comment section with a character limit.

I just want to stress again that I don't want to diminish women but I don't think they were warriors historically the way Paradox is portraying them.

Men have an average of 26 lbs. (12 kilograms) more skeletal muscle mass than women. Women also exhibit about 40 percent less upper-body strength and 33 percent less lower-body strength, on average than men. As in all the things you need for a good shieldwall.

https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jappl.2000.89.1.81

@Anarch Cassius - You referring to the Siege of Dorostolon? It sounds like civilians defending their city, kind of like Moscow.

Saxo Gramaticus is a really bad source considering he wrote fancifully hundreds of years after the lives of the shieldmaidens he's writting about.

cont

@Flavius Iulius Nepos Augustus " Have you seen people fighting in armour and using mele weapons?"

Yes, I have, and so did the Byzantines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield-maiden#Historical_accounts

Just because you only seem to aware of references from legends and sagas doesn't mean those are the only references. Provide any kind of reference to support any of claims about biology and shield walls. I'll grant you most of the named names are exagerations or leaders but that's why I'm not making it about them.

6. Khawlah bint al-Azwar - From all accounts she apparently did take part in combat, this one makes the list. 1+

7. Sichelgaita of Salerno - Again, military leader. She did charge the enemy as a morale/shame tactic to rally her troops but she was a leader not a warrior.

8. Jeanne Hachette - Women, children, the elderly. Everyone fought in last stands during sieges.

9. Isabel of Conches - Leader not warrior.

10. Joanna of Flanders - Sounds like a badass, but no, she was a leader not a warrior.

@Nimja - Sorry but this article is so incredibly disingenuous and misinformative.

1. Joan of Arc - A religious inspiration and basically a mascot, not a commander or a fighter. She was brave and very honorable though and I admire her but she was no warrior.

2. Matilda of Canossa - Not entirely familiar with her but I haven't found anything that suggests she was a warrior, only that she lead an army. Military leader =/= warrior.

3. Isabella of Castile - Not a warrior, just a military leader.

4. Caterina Sforza - Again military leader, not a warrior.

Cont...

Hmmm...

http://www.medievalists.net/2014/07/ten-medieval-warrior-women/

A woman would never be part of a shieldwall historically, the Sagas can say what they like but unless a woman had some genetic inbalance that gave her more testosterone then there's simply no way she would have the physical build be able to survive in early or late medieval combat which is why I think it's impossible they did unless for some rare occasion involving some out of the ordinary woman who was built like a bull for some related medical reason.

I don't mind women warriors in fantasy or as a start option like seduction focus or aztec invasion but when I have historical accuracy on then it's immersion breaking for my tastes is all.

Thought I'd justify myself as I know people will accuse me of sexism at some point.

@Anarch Cassius - Have you seen people fighting in armour and using mele {LINK REMOVED}weapons?https://www.aclknights.com/ Women don't compete against men because it'd be unfair for the women. In fact even female MMA fighters who physically could knock out most average fully grown men would absolutely fail when wearing padding + chainmail and given a mele weapon such as a shield and axe (they'd be absolutely useless with a bill or glave) because it requires upper body strength and overall sturdiness not skill or agility... cont

@Flavius Iulius Nepos Augustus glad you're here! :D Now you explain why this mod is historically accurate to everybody who comes to argue otherwise. I'm washing my hands of this pointless argument xD

Thank you so much my friend. This means a lot to me.

Denying the lack of female representation in one of the social classes is counter-productive to the main ideas of feminism.

I'm waiting for comments from triggered feminists

@Anarch Cassius then let me put it this way - if we take the population numbers across Europe and Asia from the entire period of the Middle Ages and then multiply the number of known female warriors from that period by 10 (just to be generous), even then the percentage of female warriors would be closer to zero than to whatever the number in CK2 is. In other words, I am not talking in binary terms: "existed-didn't exist".

As for pagan female warriors - there's barely any accounts of them as was mentioned below. There are stories, for sure - sagas and such.

I'm not talking about naming warriors. I'm talking about accounts pagan forces including women warriors.

You can say a dozen isn't "numerous" but that's subjective and frankly it's a lot more evidence than many things that are taken as historical fact have.

Whether its common or extraordinary is moot. You're admiting it happened and at the same time saying a mod to remove it entirely is historically accurate. I'm not even downvoting, but I can see how people would have a problem with that.

@Anarch Cassius again, "numerous" is not the right word. As i said, I can name about a dozen by name . If they were that common, history wouldn't treat them as if they were something extraordinary. Nobody remembers every male warrior that ever existed, do they?

The complaints are probably coming from the use of the Historically Accurate tag.

We can debate the frequency all day but the fact is, no female pagan warriors at all is less historically accurate than vanilla. There are numerous historical accounts of women warriors amonst the Norse, Celts, and other peoples.

Making them less common, removing them from religeons like the Aztecs, or adding some kind of strength factor to personal combat skill would be steps toward accuracy.

All of that being on average, of course. Modern women who have access to more nutrition, education, and training can kick lots of dudes asses. Cops, Soldiers, etc. But historical reality is historical reality.

Hey I'm with you. The idea of female warriors who stand toe to toe with men in combat is an awesome fantasy, and I tend to play female characters in games where you can become a super badass so I can live that fantasy, but biological and historical reality is just that, reality.

I think we do a disservice to the actual struggle of females throughout history by trying to shoehorn the fantasy into reality because it tickles our fancy. We should be happy we live in a society today where we don't neccesarily have to have brute dudes bashing against each other in shield walls to solve our disagreements over who owns what piece of land or resource.

That reality enables the more imaginative among us the free time to conjure up awesome stories of worlds where despite being on average stronger, faster, and 33 to 50% bigger than women, men can be matched in melee combat with badass women warriors.

Again, I am not against the idea of ancient female warriors, I'm all for it. I just think that wanting something to be true doesn't make it true. A substantial amount of evidence does.

@Lorgara also, camp followers were a thing, need to take that into account before we label any female remains as "remains of shieldmaidens".

Yeah I would like a link to the claim that half of the heathen army were females. That's a pretty bold claim with no evidence.

Ok, so I went ahead and looked up that study and the articles referencing it and found out that they studied 14 viking burials in eastern britain and found 7 men, 6 women, and 1 undetermined. The researchers themselves write at the end of the article:

'"Although the results presented here cannot be used to determine the number of female settlers, they do suggest that the ratio of females to males may have been somewhere between a third to roughly equal," the study concludes.'

So, it's a suggestion, based on a very narrow sample size of 14 burials. Not hundreds. Get back to me when they actually do the science on a bigger sample, not a tiny fraction of the burials which, for all I know, have been cherrypicked by one university's (The University of Western Australia) anthropology department to get their name in the paper.

Also, I find it rather pathetic that some people would just downvote a mod if it doesn't appeal to their style of gameplay. If you don't like it - don't subscribe. Some people want to play the game a certain way - they have every right to do so, same as those who like their horse Popes, Aztec invasions and Germanic Reformations.
Personally, I like to play female rulers 4 times out of 5 and most likely I will never even make use of this mod I made.
Any and all misogynistic comments will be deleted.

@lastofthelight interesting article. But it speaks only about a single case where a warrior turned out to be a woman. You say there were hundreds . I would like to read about those too.
I can name off the top of my head maybe a half-dozen warrior women that lived throughout the Middle Ages (some of whom were way more skilled in fighting than the men around them), but the mere fact that I can list them all by name just further proves the fact that these women were rather extraordinary by the standards of the time they lived in and that they were more of an exception that proves the rule.
I would love to be proven wrong though.

This isn't just a norse phenomenon. Women's rights /decreased/ as the middle ages went on - they did not advance. Up until the late 12th century, much of france and iberia did not exclude females from inheritence, and in some cases did not prefer men at all. This changed when increasingly centralized realms had several large and powerful women married to powerful kings; and the kings screwed the women out of their independent wealth. For example, the year 1212 in western europe is notable as virtually every monarch at the time had imprisoned his wife! Look at the battles between Peter II of Aragon and Maria of Montpellier (if he hadn't tried to steal his wife's inheritence, their lands would not have been so divided against the pope; and it didn't even work anyways). Or Eleanor of Aquataine.

Keep in mind that that grave was mentioned in anthropology classes for many years as the prototypical viking warrior grave. They never bothered to sex it because they just decided it was a man. The same thing happened with the graves of warriors who died during the battle of the Great Heathen Army; half of them were in fact women.